What tech would you un-invent?

Guns and conventional bombs come to mind. Biological weapons, chemical weapons.... Really, anything used to kill people en mass. The thing is, almost any useful item can be used as a weapon (rock, knife, tree branch), but the items listed above are used specifically to kill people on a large scale. Given the choice between getting rid of Twitter or getting rid of massive murder weapons, I'd have to go with the mass murder weapons.

Never forget something you once knew. Un-inventing is a pointless and terrible waste of time as it will most probably just be re-invented, but in a probably more primitive state.

Improve and move on and document everything, don't burn libraries.

The only time nuclear weapons have been used in anger ended a war in a way that was far less costly to life than if it had been ended by conventional means.

Since then, there has not been any conflict on nearly the same scale (world war, or even a war encompassing an entire region). The threat of nuclear war has probably *saved* countless lives that would have been lost in petty conflicts over the last six decades. As long as the only nations with access to the technology are able to restrain themselves, either through good moral reasoning or based on the knowledge that their major opponents also have the same level of weapons, then the world is relatively safe from large-scale conflict.

The threat of late is that a rogue nation - or even a paramilitary group not necessarily affiliated with a specific nation - could get their hands on these sorts of weapons... and would then potentially use it, or at least use the threat of using it to try and force demands on others. That needs to be prevented in so far as possible, but that does not require the un-making of nuclear weapons in general.

Now with all of that said, I don't think social media is worse necessarily. Just explaining why one might not think nuclear weapons are, in and of themselves, so horrible as people make them out to be.

"I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country". - George S. Patton

Follow a "Honey Boo Boo" twitter feed? Any other questions?

Cheers,
Dave

Religion is to allow Gullible people the chance to be led by the Sly.

"Of course God said I can have your Sister! What are you, an unbeliever?" was probably one of the Original Cons. :)

I wonder if the Pope has to Tithe to the mob? You want to operate in their territory, you gotta pay... lol.

Wish I had mod points at the moment. Far too many people assign the bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki special moral significance, as if it's worse for a lot of people to be killed by one very powerful bomb instead of lots of smaller ones. The earlier bombing of Tokyo caused more deaths than either atomic bomb, and was every bit as horrific. Beyond that, there are some things to note that people often overlook:

First, a big part of the reason why large-scale civilian deaths like this are abhorrent to us now is that we have embraced the idea that we can be "at war with the government of country X but not the people of country X." This is mostly a post-WW2 thing, and in fact is partly a reaction to the things that happened then. At the time, if you were at war with country X, that applied to everyone living there. It was still viewed as wrong to kill civilians just for kicks, but if civilians were killed in the process of destroying an enemy's warmaking ability, that was to be expected. Today the very concept of an "enemy civilian" is almost an oxymoron. Back then, it was not.

Second, there were a lot of innocent people at the mercy of the Japanese. Forget the deaths that an Allied invasion force would have suffered, if you like. There were still many thousands of prisoners of war and slave laborers (such as the "comfort women" from Korea) within Japan and in Japanese-occupied territory, being held and worked under terrible conditions. (It's telling that for Allied war prisoners, you had better survival odds under the Nazis than under the Imperial Japanese). The worse the war went for Japan, the worse these people were treated, and in the event of an invasion they would have likely have been massacred, as was done elsewhere. If the Allies had merely blockaded Japan without invading, the prisoners/slaves would have starved to death, along with thousands of Japanese -- it was only due to food relief carried out during the occupation that Japan escape devastating famine in 1946.

Third, the Japanese were quite intent on fighting on. The government was willing -- expected -- to sacrifice millions of civilians in order to increase Allied invasion casualties and thus get better peace terms. Even with the atomic bombings, it was a near thing, with Japanese officers attempting to capture Emperor Hirohito to prevent the surrender. (Some folks cite the USSR's entry into the war as the decisive factor, but while the Soviet army was huge and powerful, that wouldn't have mattered if they couldn't get to Japan. The Soviets had very little sealift at the time, and their paratroops were mostly used as regular infantry).

I don't deny that the civilians of Hiroshima & Nagasaki were mostly innocent, but sometimes the choice is not whether innocent people will die, but which ones will. Yes, that's horrible. I would never want to be in the position of having to decide that kind of question. But that was the question at the time: the people of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, vs. the millions of Japanese and nearly a million Allied soldiers who would die in an invasion or thousands of Japanese who would die in famine, plus the thousands of Korean and Chinese slaves and Allied prisoners who would die in either scenario.

The problem I have with social media is it is voluntary for the people on there to do what they want, the people not on there can still get linked to lots of things involuntary and especially can't remove those links. For example facebook images. If there are images of you on there and you are tagged, you will first off, not know, further on it can be indexed on google and the like, thus people can find those images but most of all, you can't, without having an account which has the picture linked to you remove the link.

'nuf said.

Nuclear weapons make war into an all or nothing affair.

Right now, they seem great, for the reasons you gave. War has become less common and less brutal. Of course, that reasoning smacks of post hoc ergo propter hoc. I'd suggest that the UN, globalized industry, globalized culture, and improved communication all contribute more to the current world peace than threat of nuclear holocaust does.

And when nukes do get used, it will make war far worse. Human civilization only exists today thanks to a stroke of luck. We got lucky when we survived the Cold War. It's easy to look back now and say "Of course things turned out this way! Things couldn't have happened differently!" But that's just a comforting illusion. It was luck. And we won't stay lucky forever.

Nukes will proliferate. More and more dictatorships will obtain them. Eventually nukes will be used. Maybe it'll be by some religious whackjob who honestly, fervently believes that god wants him to destroy the infidels. Or some non-religious nihilist, who honestly believes that human life is of no particular importance and simply doesn't care how many people he kills to reach his goals. Or some desperate despot, staring down angry throngs of rebels, and making the purely rational decision that the ICC will show him more mercy than the crowds. But it will happen. Humanity's been around for fifty thousand years, give or take, and barring unforeseen circumstances has quite a few millenia to go. The fact that we haven't used a nuke in 60 years is hardly convincing evidence that we never will.

We'd be better off if the laws of physics made nuclear technology impossible.

Since AOL opened the floodgates to the Anonymous Barbarian Horde, discourse on the net has turned to poo.

All currency is fiat currency. That's what currency is, a token, it's not worth anything independent of its value as money. That's why we don't use cans of soup, or grapes, or oxen as money. If you do, you're trading actual commodities or goods, and it's not actually money.

The idea pushed by so many ignorant people of returning to a gold-backed (or silver-backed, etc.) economy ignores several fundamental problems with doing this. First, there is potential for deflation, since as more people live, and create more things that have value, you need more currency to make an economy function, otherwise you have a general cash shortage, and that would be very bad. Second, if the holder of the gold doesn't have to exchange that gold for the cash, on demand, then what's the point, and who will ensure the government is honest in dealing with people, and isn't simply printing more money, all backed by the same, unchanged quantity of gold? If they DO have to do that, the people can descend on places where gold is exchanged en masse, demand gold, and leave the government holding a lot of worthless paper, and suddenly people will be compelled to buy and sell goods and services with gold directly, which is an incredible impediment to commerce for several reasons, many of which WERE WHY WE ABANDONED GOLD AS MONEY IN THE FIRST PLACE.

The paranoid fools who think that somehow gold-backed money is better than money that is not backed by gold, would have you believe everything was good when money was gold-based, and it wasn't. Or if it was, it wasn't because the money was backed by gold. That's the fallacy of false-cause. Gold has additional more insidious problems, like any other commodity basis for an economy. Namely, there is more of the material out there. If you go digging, find it, you can become rich. What does it mean to be rich? It is having the ability to influence what other people will do by offering or having the potential to offer them money, which again, would grant THEM influence. Etc. If you can become rich without doing actual work, you devalue all the gold already in circulation by adding the gold you found to it when you spend it, or exchange it for something else. You achieve an increase in your influence without adding value to the overall economy by DOING SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE.

In an economy based on gold, finding gold (i.e. in a river, a hillside, a mine, etc.) is not really different in its effect than counterfeiting. Having an economy backed by gold opens up the opportunity to counterfeit it in this way to anyone who cares to try if the gold is there, which it almost certainly is, since we have most likely NOT yet dug it all up. In other words, gold remains in them thar hills.

Using gold directly gives you other problems, such as how can you know the gold coin you've just been handed is in fact gold all the way through, and isn't filled with lead? Will everyone carry scales around with them? Its a dumb idea, for many more reasons than just the ones I listed here.

So I close by reiterating my point, All currency is fiat.

BTW, lack of currency never prevented a war since the advent of the loan. Just ask Caesar.

We already had them, actually.

To be honest, if I have to go out because of privileged retards arguing about which fiscal system they're completely misinterpreting is right, I'll take the nuclear option. Sure, it could be horrible if you're outside the circle of immediate annihilation - but at least you have the chance of being instantly whisked away in a brilliant inferno.

Biological and chemical weapons are far more... disturbing, and potentially painful.

I'm not afraid of the man with his finger on the button of 10,000 nukes.
I'm afraid of the man with his finger on the button of just one.

well there's an infinity of mission options, so you gotta limit the number of choices somewhere. That's not a problem.

The problem here is that the options chosen aren't very good or consistent.

The internet, Computer mouse, Physical media -- what's the point of including these? If someone doesn't like them, they can simply not buy or use them. They don't bother you unless you actively seek them out.

Social media -- same point as above. However I suppose if other people keep hounding you to join Facebook, it can get annoying.

Cell phones -- yes, definitely belongs here... at the top of the list. Who would've thought such a seemingly useful invention would cause so much annoyance?

Ubiquitous video cameras -- what the hell? Does making large numbers of invention X turn it into invention Y?

Nuclear bombs -- obviously yes, no explanation needed.

The EU never started any war (although we participated in some because we are the US's lap dog). Germany was not part of the EU when WWII started because there was no EU back then. The EU works really well against wars. Even if we wanted to start one we would first bicker about who delivers what and how much it would cost the respective members for about twenty years, and after that there would be no reason to start the war anymore. Unfortunately, that is the reason Clinton intervened in the Balkan in the 1990s: because we were too busy bickering to solve this European problem.

> The internet, Computer mouse, Physical media -- what's the point of including these? If someone doesn't like them, they can simply not buy or use them. They don't bother you unless you actively seek them out.

I guess YOUR door has not been hammered with computer mouse. Well, that has actually happened to me, but I still do like these. But your argument is still false. Even if you don't use the internet, people can tell lies about you in there. But then again, that goes more to the social media.

> Social media -- same point as above. However I suppose if other people keep hounding you to join Facebook, it can get annoying.

Facebook is a real pain, because a lot of companies are starting to put their stuff there, which I can not then see, because I don't want to be part of Facebook and they require login.

> Cell phones

These save a lot of lives.

> Nuclear bombs -- obviously yes, no explanation needed.

Nuclear bombs save a lot of lives by preventing wars. And even if they didn't, the amount of people killed by nuclear bombs is very little compared e.g. to people killed by passive smoking.

My understanding is that a need for gold (to use as currency) was a major reason for the Roman invasions first of Gaul (recent finds show pre-Roman Celts had significant gold-mining operations) and then of Dacia (now Romania). We can say with more certainty that gold was a major motive of the Spanish conquest of the New World.

The mechanism by which commodity-backed currencies motivate wars looks pretty straightforward: If your economy grinds to a screeching halt and you want to do "quantitative easing," you need to physically go out and grab more of the commodity. Fiat currencies avoid at least this issue -- and your argument about them being useful for funding wars seems to apply just as well to funding any other activity.

(It's also worth noting that, if you do have a gold or a gold-backed currency, and you do succeed in grabbing a bunch of coin from your neighbors, then, despite being commodity-backed, you will still have inflation. Apparently this is what happened in the Spanish empire as a result of all that New World gold.)

Why in the world would Truman, et al, have thought that the deaths of Japanese civilians would in any way alter the decisions of the Japanese government? Only months before, during the Battle of Okinawa, the Japanese military persuaded (and sometimes forced) those civilians to commit mass suicide rather than surrender. Not Japanese soldiers, mind you, but Japanese civilians. In fact, the military distributed grenades to them for this very purpose. The same sort of thing had happened earlier at Saipan. In that case, Emperor Hirohito himself issued orders for the suicides (though Japanese ultranationalists dispute that). At least a thousand Japanese civilians jumped to their deaths from the cliffs at Marpi Point while Japanese troops fought a holding action to prevent the Americans from stopping them. How would the prospect of civilian deaths have been a lever against the Japanese government when they were not merely indifferent to them but encouraged and facilitated them?

The reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and Kokura, the for which Nagasaki was an alternate target) where chosen was that they hadn't been severely bombed previously, so that all of the destruction would be from the single atomic bomb, thus emphasizing how powerful it was. The Japanese government may not have cared about the civilians, but they did care about their industrial capacity, which cities were necessary for. In that sense, what happened to Japan was important to them, but what happened to the Japanese was not (unless it was surrender, which was to be prevented by death). Yes, a whole lot of civilians would die as a result of showing the Japanese government what the US could now do, but as I pointed out in my original post, back then such things were expected by everyone. Even so, the US dropped leaflets over cities on the atomic bomb target list, warning civilians to leave. That's hardly consistent with the "look how many civilians we can kill in one go" strategy you claim.

The Japanese government was most definitely not seeking a surrender. In fact, they almost didn't surrender after the bombing at Nagasaki.

With all due respect to Admiral Leahy, he's wrong. First, a single powerful weapon is not more barbarous than an equivalent number of smaller weapons. It's more dangerous, because once it exists it's much easier for a small number of people to carry out a bigger amount of destruction, but morally, it's the same. It's no more or less wrong than the conventional bombing of Tokyo, which killed more people than either atomic bomb and which his quote implicitly approves of. Second,

it's amazing how many people just need to ask a quick question but spend 3 minutes per call in voice mail messaging mazes, just to eventually ask for a person.

And for those that need a lot of help those voice mail navigation to the right department only further frustrates customers who are the back bone of any company.